Comments on the race of life.

Vault Disney #3 : Fantasia

My mother ABSOLUTELY loved Fantasia which she saw in America when I was two years old. It was the first of its kind, and of course it used classical music which made it “good”. It’s the one movie I remember she took us to with pleasure – which made it more notable!

Even by today’s standards, Fantasia, stands as a huge experimental piece of media. There is nothing else quite like it (Unless you count its follow-up Fantasia 2000). As Deems Taylor, the master of ceremonies in the film, says early on, Fantasia is all about allowing animators, with little to no understanding of musical structure, to create images and stories out of the sounds heard in a classical piece of music. What follows is a collection of eight shorts which range from the abstract to the comical to the immensely imaginative and finally concludes with easily one of the darkest stories Disney has ever put on screen.

Disney was actually one of the first companies to ever find a way to attach music to film in a way that made it possible to animate for a specific piece of music. The…